The 6th Workshop of Applied Computing for the Management of the Environment and Natural Resources (WCAMA) has the main goal to promote the integration, in an effective way, between computing (methodologies and tools) and environment (politics and management). Natural resources management is a complex and dynamic activity. It demands the integration between actors in the social, political, and technological fields to be effectively developed.

SCOPE

The workshop will cover the whole range of research and applications in methodologies, techniques and computational tools applied to environment management and natural resources, including (but not limited to):

Control of air pollution

Environmental fragility

Environmental monitoring

Environmental policies

Environmental readaptation

Environmental sanitation and waste treatment

Environmental sustainability

Flooded areas and wetlands

Global environmental changes

Health and environment

Land use and land cover change modelling

Landscape ecology

Natural and renewable resources management

Noise and environment

Priority areas for conservation

Reduction of gas emissions

Society and environment

Soil pollution

Solid waste management

Species distribution modeling

Transport and environment

Urban ecology

PAPERS FORMAT

WCAMA 2015 will accept two types of submission:

Full Papers between 6 (six) and 10 (ten) pages. These papers will be presented orally.

Abstract Papers/Software Demonstrations between 2 (two) and 4 (four) pages. This kind of paper must present a specification or proposal of software within the scope of the workshop. These papers will be presented in a demonstration session.

Papers must be written in Portuguese or English, following the Brazilian Computer Society template (http://www.sbc.org.br/index.php?option=com_jdownloads&Itemid=195&task=viewcategory&catid=32). Manuscripts must be submitted without the authors’ names and affiliations (double blind review). Papers that do not follow these procedures will be rejected.

The value of ecosystem services is often hard to determine, but undoubtedly high in both fragmented and connected landscapes. A new study in PLoS ONE by Giannini et al. takes a novel approach to calculating how ecosystem services may be impacted by climate change, and how conservation planners can determine focal areas for maintaining connectivity in both current and future conditions. Using a tropical stingless bee (Melipona quadrifasciata) native to the Brazilian Atlantic Forest, the authors conducted a connectivity analysis to determine how the species range would shift, and where key areas might be impacted in terms of ecosystem services.

The authors first modeled shifts in bee pollinator range due to climate change by combining distribution models with forecasted climate scenarios. They then used the resulting distributions to perform habitat connectivity analysis based on graph theory, which allowed them to identify priority areas for conservation and restoration. The study is the first of its kind to provide an integrated approach for identifying the best areas for conservation and restoration considering dispersal capabilities, habitat connectivity and changes in climate over time using ecosystem services as a study model.

The results not only highlight potential corridors for bees in South America that would safeguard against future climate change, but also provide a methodological framework to help planners identify key areas that will be important in the future. Conservation needs, for bees at least, are time dependent: areas in the southern part of the bees’ range will be most important in the future, but areas in the northern part of their range are essential to maintain current connectivity. As bees expand southward, they will bring their pollination services with them.

The framework provides a link between species connectivity modeling and species distribution modeling, resulting in the integration of habitat configuration and climate change effects. This approach can be useful for planners to determine high priority corridors and other regions to focus on to maintain connectivity. Supporting ecosystem services under climate change will be critical for maintaining ecosystem balance in the future.

This blog is part of the Agriculture and Ecosystems Blog’s month-long series on Ecosystem Services.

By Barbara Gemmill-Herren and Hien Ngo

Bees are the world’s most important pollinators, bar none. Increasingly, the global community recognizes that their demise is critical – to both human livelihoods2,3 and the health of ecosystems1. Honeybee declines are even featured on the cover story of Time Magazine in this year’s August 19th issue, a rare feat for an insect!

Apis dorsata on mustard in Chitwan, Nepal Photo Credit: Dino Martins

But long before, the Convention on Biological Diversity took note of pollinator declines and established the International Pollinator Initiative in 2000.

The initiative recognizes, quite correctly, that honeybees are not the only pollinators in town, or on the farm. Indeed a recent publication by Garibaldi et al. 20132 highlighted the critical, irreplaceable role that wild bees play in agriculture. But, we still need more information on managed and wild bee pollination services, and how they can best be managed in synchrony to provide optimal pollination services. We need to know more specific information on the extent and causes of pollinator declines, so that we know where we need to focus on reversing such trends.

The Science of Pollination Services in Agricultural Development

Pollination is one of 17 recognized ecosystem services. The production of over 75% of the world’s most important crops and 35% of the food produced is dependent upon animal pollination1. The services provided by pollination have significant economic value as well. In the EU, insect pollination has an estimated value of 15 billion euros per year2.

Yet there have been mounting questions about how relevant pollination may be to agricultural development and food security. The vast majority of studies of pollination services to crops have been carried out in Europe and North America; and certainly the problems we know to impact pollinators most severely – a high dependence on agricultural chemicals and monocropped landscapes offering little diet diversity to pollinators – are typical features of industrialised, Northern agriculture.But this concept, of pollination deficits being primarily a concern of Northern, intensified agriculture is being put to a test.

When pollination was recognized as a global concern, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) was able to coordinate the development and implementation of a global project on pollination services. The project was developed in collaboration with seven developing countries: Brazil, Ghana, India, Kenya, Nepal, Pakistan and South Africa.

One of the priorities of this project – as identified by the participating countries – was to develop a protocol to identify and assess pollination deficits from a farmer’s perspective, led by FAO and the Institut National de la Agronomique in Avignon, France.

It has been applied in the seven participating countries, and the results so far suggest that management practices to ensure abundant pollinators can increase fruit sets in mango orchards in Ghana by 35%, improve the production of mustard seed in Nepal by 25%,and increase the canola oil content in rapeseed by 8% in Brazil.

How to assess ecosystem services?

In 2013, the new Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) came into force, the Biodiversity equivalent of the Nobel-Prize winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. While IPBES is working out its working modalities, the Government of Norway has taken a look at the pollination deficit protocol developed by FAO, and suggested that a better understanding of how to apply it could give insight into the future work of IPBES.

Thus, the Norwegian Directorate of Nature Management has supported FAO to prepare trainers (Hien included), to train national research partners in five additional countries: Argentina, China, Colombia, Indonesia and Zimbabwe.

As IPBES is intended to be a science-knowledge-policy interface, indigenous and local communities were invited to give input through the Indigenous Partnership on Agrobiodiversity and Food Sovereignty. The project seeks to provide input to IPBES on how indigenous and local communities might differently understand and assess pollinators and pollination services from a purely scientific approach; and also how they will apply the protocol to coffee farms run by indigenous communities in southern India.

Using a common, simple protocol that can be applied and adapted to a multitude of local conditions and systems could be one way for IPBES to approach the assessment of ecosystem services. But what can it add to the value of local assessments?

Meta-analyze that!

Comparing global trends from local assessments in a meta-analysis would be very helpful in gaining a global perspective on pollination deficits. Meta-analysis, could provide a powerful lens through which to analyze the conclusions and outcomes from FAO’s pollination deficit protocol. There is also certainly a need to bring the best research findings to the scrutiny of policy-makers.

Meta-analyzers from around the world held a “working workshop” this past July, in São Paulo, Brazil, where participants prepared an analytical framework and the datasets from eleven countries and eleven cropping systems (from raspberries, to rapeseed, clover, pumpkin and more) for a meta-analysis of pollination deficits.

Questions for Policy Makers

The questions that we believe the combined datasets may be able to address in some measure, are:

How is crop yield related to the number of hives per ha and/or wild-pollinator assemblage (density, richness, evenness, etc.)?

How is the wild-pollinator affected by landscape composition and configuration (e.g. distance to natural habitats) and/or management practices?

How does pollinator and yield stability vary with landscape composition, configuration and management?

How does pollinator density, diversity and the benefits of wild and managed pollinators interact with climatic conditions across years?

How do pollinator assemblages vary across geographic regions and agronomic systems?

The results? Unfortunately, they aren’t that easy to churn out. It will take time, effort and a lot of statistical prowess to draw conclusions from such a large global dataset.

But we have committed to bringing the preliminary results to a meeting of principal researchers and policy makers from a number of the participating countries this September in Kenya. Our intention is to have researchers, policymakers and representatives of indigenous people sit down together and think about possible policy responses to the trends revealed from these questions.

It is too simple to only say “so many hives are needed per hectare for good production”. The number of people keeping hives around the world is in decline; wild bees are often better pollinators than managed bees; pesticides and loss of natural habitat heavily impacts the populations of bees. Once we know the science, it is in the hands of policymakers and the general public to commit to goal-oriented solutions.

The results from applying the deficit protocol in many sites around the world will be published soon in a special issue of the Journal of Pollination Ecology.

Meta-analyzers at the Sao Paolo conference included: Antonio Saraiva at the University of Sao Paulo and the research center on biodiversity and computing (BioComp); Lucas Garibaldi at the Universidad Nacional de Rio Negro and Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientificas y Tecnicas in Argentina, lead author of the recent Science meta-analysis article on the importance of wild pollinators for crop pollination, and Luisa Carvalheiro, of University of Leeds and Naturalis in the Netherlands.

About the Authors:

Barbara Gemmill-Herren is a Programme Specialist and Focal Point for the International Pollinator Initiative at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). She is also a member of the CGIAR Research Program on Water, Land and Ecosystem’s (WLE) Ecosystem Services and Resilience Advisory Group.

Hien Ngo is a PhD student at York University (Toronto, Canada) and is a consultant to FAO on pollination matters.